Serial entrepreneur & Tesla boss, Elon Musk, got a lot of attention last week when he said he could fix South Australia’s ‘energy crisis’ by building a massive battery storage farm.
South Australia’s energy crisis quickly became Australia’s as we all learned that the country not only faces an electricity shortfall and price rises, but a poor energy investment climate-that is there’s not much incentive for big companies to invest here.
It certainly prompted the Prime Minister to jump in to the fray, first by promising $2B to ramp up supply from the Snowy Mountain hydro electric scheme and then telling the gas industry they need to do more to help.
South Australia wants to build a gas powered plant too, but it’s their offer of $150M to subsidise 100 megawatts of power storage that’s sparked lots of private sector interest.
Mr Musk might have got all the headlines, but Asian and local companies like Zen Energy, Lyon Solar and West Australian company Carnegie Energy also look keen to get involved.
As Carnegie Chief Michael Ottaviano told the media “nobody in Australia has built anything close to that, it’d be one of the world’s – if not the world’s – biggest utility battery.”
Apparently Zen Energy already has plans for a $100 million solar plant with 100 megawatts of battery storage in the Upper Spencer Gulf, and that also looks like the region where the proposed battery farm will be sited.
That makes a lot of sense given the huge potential for solar and wind generated power here, but South Australia is already leading the country on clean energy, a role that hasn’t won it a lot of love in Canberra unfortunately.
No matter where you stand on renewables versus traditional forms of electricity supply, its an undeniable fact that clean energy keeps getting cheaper, easier to install, store and distribute, and with a growing role in mainstream power grids around the world.
Battery storage will be absolutely crucial to bringing greater stability to renewable electricity supply and its exciting to see South Australia take such an innovative approach, one that could be a model here and internationally.
Of course I’m not saying battery storage is likely to solve our ‘energy crisis’, but like any business as usual disruption it could be the start of a whole new way of thinking about and solving some tough problems.